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It has a temporary address for the time being, but is easily reached. It will soon become a permanent part of this site.

Photo of the Month: click on the photo to see a full-sized image.

“John Tranter may now be Australia’s most important poet.”

 — US Publishers’ Weekly, 2007      

Including reviews, interviews, photos, and poems, this site offers over a thousand printed pages of free reading matter, and has been visited more than thirty thousand times. Enjoy!

John Tranter, Sydney, 2009
photo by Anders Hallengren. More photos of John Tranter «here»

Starlight: 150 Poems (UQP, September 2010) wins the
2011 Age Poetry Book of the Year: from the judges’ comments:

“AFTER a career of more than 40 years, John Tranter has become that paradoxical thing: the postmodern master. Ghosting others’ poems, using “proceduralist” approaches to composition and revising and mistranslating “classic” works (such as Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal), Tranter produces something entirely original and — most importantly — superbly entertaining. The inventiveness of Starlight seems unending, offering us a countless array of brilliant images and atmospheres, hilarious ideas and compelling melanges of styles and registers. Starlight could well be Tranter’s masterpiece.” — David McCooey, The Saturday Age. Saturday 06 August 2011.

Starlight: 150 Poems (UQP, September 2010) wins the
2011 Queensland Premier’s Award for poetry: from the judges’ comments:

This book can be seen as the culmination of John Tranter’s middle career, a period marked by explorations of the ways in which poems can be generated. The most important poem of the collection is probably the first, “The Anaglyph”, which already seems like the major Australian poem of this century so far. Here, an answer is written to Ashbery’s “Clepsydra” whereby the original is evacuated so that only the first and last words of each line remain and the new poem is written by retaining them. Although this description of «Starlight: 150 Poems» makes it seem formally obsessive, it is still a book of poems that has a lot to say and “The Anaglyph” — in part a parody, in part a homage and in part an answer to an early poem by Tranter’s great middle-period mentor — is very much a poem about those modern obsessions of textuality and influence.

From Andrew Wilkins, in Bookseller + Publisher, Sept. 2010: “The publication of Starlight… follows the highly successful Urban Myths (2006), which won just about every literary award going, including the overall prize in the South Australian Premier’s Award for Literature… Reading the 150 poems in this collection is to spend time in the company of a writer steeped (well-versed?) in the work of other poets, and able to assume different narrative voices at will… Infiltrating his work is a dry, laconic wit and a rich understanding of culture and history. […] A particular pleasure was the lively sequence ‘At the Movies’, which ruminates on films of the past, and Tranter’s updated response to Baudelaire’s celebrated Les Fleurs du mal, which is every bit as wicked and visceral as the original.”
    At the top right of this page you can find links to various reviews of the book, news about the book’s reception, selections of poems from the book, and extensive notes on the poems. Elsewhere on the net, you can read poems from this book here, here, and here. So see the ‘Starlight’ links, above right.

See Photos from the Sydney launch 22 Sep 2010

Link: Limited Edition for sale
see below

Having more or less avoided the wheels of the juggernaut (definition) of Academia since my 1971 B.A., I stumbled in 2005 and woke to find myself enrolled in a course at the University of Wollongong. The thesis dissertation consists of 113 poems and a 30,000-word exegesis (definition). The Doctor of Creative Arts degree, highly commended, was conferred in 2009.

Most of the poems in my 2010 collection Starlight: 150 Poems are based on the 113 poems I wrote for part of that thesis, and many of these thesis poems were changed and some deleted for book publication. Yes, you can read those ‘lost’ poems in the thesis! The thesis also contains a thirty-thousand word exegesis (where I explain everything) and it is now available for free download from the University of Wollongong Library

Epigraph:
We know that all literature is a form of disguise, a mask, a fable, a mystery: and behind the mask is the author.
                      — Leon Edel

Abstract: ‘Distant Voices’ consists of two parts: a collection of poems and a thirty-thousand word exegesis.

The poems are presented in three groups.
In Vocoder four long poems explore, in different ways, the idea of displacing the authorial ego with a kind of writing at one or two removes, through the process of translation, ventriloquy, mask or disguise.
Speaking French presents 101 deliberate mistranslations of some of Rimbaud’s ‘Illuminations’ and poems by Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Verlaine.
At the Movies is a group of narrative, discursive and reflective poems that speak about various movies and their cultural settings.

The exegesis is also presented in three parts. In it the poet John Tranter is discussed in the third person.
Part 1: About the Poems discusses the means of production and some of the theoretical implications of the poems presented in this thesis, partly in the context of Tranter’s earlier work, as the poems develop, extend and criticise some of Tranter’s earlier literary strategies.
Part 2: Prior projects discusses Tranter’s forty-year career as a writer, editor, publisher, radio producer, critic and anthologist, relating these changing roles to the writing in his twenty-odd books and his other projects, and attempting to trace a developing strand of experimental practice that finds its apotheosis in the process of translation, ventriloquy, mask or disguise underlying the thesis poems.
Part 3: Dream-Work looks at the three poets who have most influenced his work: Arthur Rimbaud, the Australian hoax poet ‘Ern Malley’, and the contemporary US poet John Ashbery, and also at the tripartite structure qualifying much of Tranter’s writing. Poetry is seen to occupy a liminal position in the Venn diagram where three fields overlap: dream theory, movie creation and criticism, and literary creation and criticism.

Limited Edition for sale: Keen librarians and other serious readers can obtain a limited edition printed and professionally bound copy of the thesis: one of only twenty copies, typeset in a digital version of the Dante font as glimpsed above. Whet your curiosity here: Limited Edition.

MLA Update: I attended the 2011 Modern Languages Association convention at the Los Angeles Marriott Hotel in January: over 700 sessions. I gave two papers on Jacket: one, on Jacket as a conduit for British Postmodern poetry into the US, another on “The Elephant has Left the Room”, the migration of Jacket to UPenn in Philadelphia and a vigorous future. Some other papers were exciting, especially the panel on Derek Attridge and «Theory after “Theory”». The regular off-site reading, hosted this year by UCLA’s debonair Brian Kim Stefans, an old friend, was huge: over seventy readers in The Waste Land of DownTown Los Angeles. (Photo, below right: "The Dinosaur has Left the Room", Santa Monica 2011. Photo John Tranter.)

And I discovered a wonderful fountain pen shop in a suburb of Los Angeles: new pens, antiques, and repairs: F. Krinke; 2640 S. Myrtle #12; Monrovia, CA 91016-8204, USA, near Pasadena. Throw away your iPad, adjust your ego, and go there now:
http://www.tmgp.com/cgi-bin/nph-tame/penshop/about.htm.

Back to sunny Australia: I attended the 2011 Conference for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne in July, and delivered a version of my MLA paper: “The Elephant Has Left the Room”. I also attended the younger and livelier Deakin University Conference at the Melbourne Trades Hall, where I talked about how I came to write the work in Starlight: 150 Poems, my most recent book. Apparently it needs some explicating. What with the poetry, the drinks and the book launch at the bar upstairs, and another launch and reading at the wonderful Collected Works bookshop (1st Floor, The Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston St., Melbourne: corner Swanston St. and Flinders Lane), a fun time was had by all in the Edinburgh of the South.

Available now as Kindle ebooks: less than a dollar each! Cheaper than a good glass of beer!
Ten out-of-print books… over five hundred pages of hard-to-get poetry for peanuts, carefully edited and designed to follow the exact contents of the original out-of-print editions.

[Kindle] 1970 Parallax and other poems: ISBN 978-0-9871159-0-4

[Kindle] 1972 Red Movie and other poems: ISBN 978-0-9871159-1-1

[Kindle] 1974 The Blast Area: ISBN 978-0-9871159-2-8

[Kindle] 1976 The Alphabet Murders: ISBN 978-0-9871159-3-5

[Kindle] 1977 Crying in Early Infancy: 100 Sonnets: ISBN 978-0-9871159-4-2

[Kindle] 1979 Dazed in the Ladies Lounge: ISBN 978-0-9871159-5-9

[Kindle] 1982 Selected Poems 1982: ISBN 978-0-9871159-6-6

[Kindle] 1986 Gloria: ISBN 978-0-9871159-7-3

[Kindle] 1997 Gasoline Kisses ISBN 978-0-9871159-9-7

[Kindle] 2000 Blackout ISBN 978-0-9871159-8-0

Detail from Édouard Manet:
“A Good Glass of Beer”

2011 Update: on 25 May 2011, Her Excellency Professor Marie Bashir AC CVO, Governor of New South Wales, joined Australian poets, educators, policy makers and supporters of the literary community to celebrate the launch of the Australian Poetry Library website. The soirée event, held at Government House, was a night to honour and pay tribute to many of Australia’s poets, and was enjoyed by all who braved the wild and wet weather in Sydney. Here’s the new site: [»»]

[...] Brian Johns AO, Chair of the Copyright Agency Limited Cultural Fund Committee, made some impassioned comments about the value of supporting our creators through the Australian Poetry Library website saying, “This is an imaginative way of supporting our poets, and linking their work to the educational sector to the benefit of all”. Dr Kate Lilley, daughter of well-known poet Dorothy Hewitt, read one of her mother’s most well-loved poems, “This Version of Love”, and Meredith McKinney, daughter of Judith Wright, read “Eve to Her Daughters”, one of her personal favourites from her mother’s collection. John Tranter, the originator of this concept and one of the driving forces behind this project, delivered a rousing reading of a poem from one of his great friends John Forbes, entitled “Monkey’s Pride”. Many were amused to discover that this poem was actually named after a racehorse on which he won a few dollars that day! (from CAL publicity)

NEW: The Salt Companion to John Tranter
The blurb says: “The essays published here focus on key works in Tranter’s career to date, emphasising the importance of his work as editor as well as poet, both in an Australian and in an international context. They include close readings of poems that illustrate the formal range of his work, assess the reception of his books in the context of his perceived role as symbolic representative of an urban, cosmopolitan, tradition in Australian culture, and provide fresh interpretations of his relationships with English, French and American literature.” Read the Preface here.

See Photos from the Sydney launch 22 Sep 2010

NEW: John Tranter interviewed by Brian Henry, 2010: “…the audience has more than a painting to consider: they have a whole history lesson, an artistic argument and an Oedipal struggle as well.”

Lazybones, sleepin’ in the sun… Some time ago I was invited to become a visiting Fellow at the Civitella Ranieri, a castle in Umbria, Italy, to work on a sequence of new poems. You can see a slideshow sequence of some thirty photos I have taken of the Civitella and its surrounds on this site. Here are some photos of cloudscapes. Here’s the informative website of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. And yes, in between taking photographs I did write some poems: fifty-six loose adaptations of poems from the 1861 edition of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, which found a home in my next book, above.

Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected (UQP, 2006, 322 pages) has been awarded:

 — The 2006 Victorian state award for poetry

 — The 2007 New South Wales state award for poetry

 — The 2008 South Australian state award for poetry books published in 2006 or 2007, and

 — The 2008 South Australian Premier’s Prize for the best book overall (fiction, non-fiction, poetry and others for the years 2006 and 2007).

No other book of poetry has been so popular with the judges of so many different state awards. You can read the judges’ [»] readers’ reports here. You can download a PDF file of the first half of the book here: [»] Urban Myths: 523 pages. You can also read 100 pages of notes to the book [»»] here on this site, and you can order the (beautifully) printed version of the book direct from [»] the publisher.

Would you like to know the secret of John Tranter’s success? He always keeps this advice in mind, from [»] Screenwriting, a book by Richard Walter: When asked to offer his single most important piece of advice for writers, writer Tommy Thompson responded after a long, thoughtful pause: Every day, no matter what else you do, get dressed.

Note from John Tranter: This site began in 1998. It is not a weblog, updated every day. Instead, it grows gradually, and is designed to be a long-term useful resource for people wanting to know about my life and my work. It is already over a thousand pages long.

Here you can read my [»] poems, and read about my life (here’s a biographical [»] note) and what has formed my writing practice. There are [»] interviews with me and [»] reviews of my books (not all the reviews are favourable!) and [»] photos taken at various stages of my life.

Who am I? I sometimes wonder… My father wanted me to be a farmer, and I wanted to be a fighter pilot or a buddhist monk. What lonely occupations! Fortunately we were both wrong. I have been writing poetry for forty years; twenty books of poetry (here is a [»] list) and a book of experimental fiction, [»] Different Hands. I also edited four anthologies including co-editing the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991), published in Britain and the US as the Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry. In 1997 I founded the free Internet literary magazine [»] Jacket. In 2010 I arranged to give the magazine, with its eight thousand or so pages of back issues, to the University of Pennsylvania. They will take over the joy and the burden of Jacket in 2011, and will give it a good home, ensuring its long-term growth and its archival future.

APRIL

In 2004 I started a project to put thousands of Australian poems on the Internet. It has grown into the Australian Poetry Resources Internet Library (APRIL: what a nice acronym!) and has been funded with a half-million-dollar Linkage Grant from the Australian Research Council, starting in mid-2006. Professor Elizabeth Webby and Creagh Cole, from the University of Sydney, in association with [»] CAL (the Copyright Agency Limited), will head a team of researchers to build a permanent and wide-ranging library of resources on the University of Sydney Library Internet server. You can see how the work is progressing here: http://april.edu.au/

If you notice any typos or errors on this site, please let me know:
[»] Send an email to John Tranter

Reprinted!
The Floor of Heaven, a collection of four long loosely-linked narrative poems, reprinted by Jacket Press and distributed by the University of Queensland Press in June 2007.


‘A rattling good read!’
 — John Ashbery, launching the book in 1992

‘The Floor of Heaven is a tour de force, a devious and profoundly subversive conjuring trick by a poet writing at the peak of his powers… the book pulses with a curious resonance… reminded me irresistibly of the best moments in Twin Peaks… a strange lyricism.’
 — Andrew Riemer, Sydney Morning Herald

‘The Floor of Heaven is a hypnotic read; it will stay with you when you come out of your trance…’
 — Carmel Bird, Australian Book Review

‘… a crudity of feeling that gives many of his early poems the glazed, dated air of 70s airport lounges.… The Floor of Heaven is very dull reading and gets duller as the trash novel impetus of the narrative wears away… a literature of defeat.’
 — Alison Croggon, ABC Books and Writing

More free downloads! A free PDF file of [»] The Floor of Heaven. Like the Urban Myths file, this PDF file is free to download and read in its entirety, but it cannot be printed. Printed copies of this book can be purchased from [»] the publisher’s website or from the University of Queensland Bookshop mail order department: phone (617+) 3346 9434, fax (617+) 3365 1988 and email at
<benc[ât]uqp.uq.edu.au>